by Sally Baker

Send a poet to write about the last gasp of a family farm and, if you're very lucky, you'll get a book like Here and Nowhere Else (Beacon Press, 1995).

Jane Brox '78 is the granddaughter of Italian and Lebanese immigrants. Her paternal grandfather settled his family on a dairy farm in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts in 1900; Brox's father, now in his mid-80s, also made the land his life's work. Under his stewardship, the farm's slapped-together, afterthought vegetable stand--where Brox worked as a child--became a substantial business, both in receipts and in infrastructure. The stand can turn over 500 dozen ears of corn on a single summer day and hundreds of bushels of tomatoes, apples, squash, peaches--and much more--in a season.

Brox describes working at the stand now. People come in for the things they know, the things they've bought for years, like corn 13 to the dozen. Brox's herb display, placed prominently where her father and brother think the beans ought to go, invites tentative curiosity but not many sales. It is a metaphor for Brox's presence on the farm. She is of the land, but not like a farmer --she works it with words, preserves it by writing about it even as she realizes that its best days are gone. But, like the herbs, she is a bit of a mystery to the keepers of the physical farm. She writes of trying to describe to her father what her work is like:

"I can see him laboring to fit my answers in with his own idea of work, of a steel blade cutting through the thick April rye and his wake of turned-up earth. One works by going back and forth as the sun arcs across the spring sky, and there's sheer physical exhaustion at the end of the day. Against which all I can muster is: `You get a different kind of tired.'"

When Brox left the valley for Colby she stayed away. She lived on Nantucket for several years, then outside Boston; though she visited her family every few months, her sense, she writes, was that she had left the farm for good. She was publishing regularly in literary magazines, and she spent time at many prestigious writing colonies, including Yaddo.

But one Christmas half a dozen years ago, she and her two brothers and sister gathered at their parents' house. Sam, the brother who stayed to work the farm (his problems with drugs, alcohol and blasted hopes are legion), endured a recrimination session with his siblings. He stood, upbraided them for not understanding how difficult it had been to stay on the farm, pointed to each of them in turn and said, "You left. You left. You left." Brox returned.

She lives in a small house on the farm grounds. Sam lives in another, her parents in another. She and Sam hardly speak anymore. It's clear that she went home with a notion of rescuing the farm, seeing it through for at least one more generation. No one else can, she thinks.

When her father is hospitalized, he reminds Brox to remind Sam to put the Hubbard squash in the stand before Thanksgiving--no one will buy it after that, he says. Sam is careless; he starts things he'll never finish; his grandiose plans for the farm wither under his father's practicality and his own fecklessness. Brox must choose a few squash to put aside for seed. Her father says they must be heavy for their size, unbruised and light-colored. She goes home and looks at the Hubbards--literally tons of squash stacked under a tarp:

"I walked around the circumference and saw many that would be fine for seed, but they were all mixed in with ones of lesser quality, and I had to lift and shift parts of the pile. The squash were awkward and heavy and not easy for me to handle. Some I could barely manage. And there were beautiful large ones that, when I picked them up, felt lighter than they should. Heavy for its size, he had said. . . . "

Her father's high expectations and her anxiousness about fulfilling them nestle in the simple scene. As the years have passed Brox has realized that she can't save the farm--it was never meant to be her role. When her father dies the farm probably will be sold and "developed" for the land-hungry commuters who whiz by every day. If anyone will work it, Sam will; and he probably can't. His family worries about what will happen to him; they regret that he didn't find another career while he could. Her father worries, too, about something more basic: "I wonder where people will get their corn," he says.

But, while Brox won't grow that corn, what she has done in this volume is preserve a picture of times past while explicating the clash of rural New England with a modern culture that values split-levels over barns and silos. She doesn't judge; she observes. And in her observations lies a beauty that evokes both sadness and wonder.

One of Colby's most revered graduates, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, is the subject of a biography written by Illinois Senator Paul Simon.

Freedom's Champion: Elijah Lovejoy(Southern Illinois University Press, 207 pages, $24.95) is a revised edition of Simon's 1964 book Lovejoy, Martyr to Freedom. The book celebrates Lovejoy's courage and commitment to freedom of the press but points out flaws in the man that may have led to his death. Simon maintains that Lovejoy lacked both diplomacy and a pragmatist's sense of how to get things done, thereby alienating much of the readership of the Observer, the newspaper he died protecting in Alton, Ill., in 1837. Simon also discusses the complexity and contradictions of Lovejoy's moral positions. For instance, while he demanded racial equality and was a fierce anti-slavery crusader, Lovejoy wrote vitriolic diatribes against Roman Catholics.

Nonetheless, Lovejoy's refusal to submit to mob rule after pro-slavery forces twice destroyed his printing press demonstrated the "courage and serenity" of a man who knew he was right, Simon writes. Much of the book is devoted to the events leading up to and immediately following Lovejoy's murder. Lovejoy and a small band of armed friends attempted to defend the Observer from being destroyed on November 7, 1837. The man considered America's first martyr to freedom of the press was silenced by a hail of bullets as he tried to topple a ladder on which a man was preparing to torch the roof where the printing press was secured.

Simon makes clear that Lovejoy's influence was enduring. One of Lovejoy's best friends, Edward Beecher --the son of a prominent anti-slavery crusader and head of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Ill.-- was galvanized by his friend's death. Beecher went on to become a powerful voice against slavery as a nationally prominent preacher. Fourteen years after Lovejoy was murdered, Beecher's sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Anne Martin Worster '59
and Bonnie Thompson Glaser
Ruby: An Ordinary Woman
Faber and Faber
Ruby: An Ordinary Woman is the diary of Ruby Alice Side Thompson, an opinionated, passionate woman who was born in 1884 and died in 1970.

Born in England, Ruby moved to the U.S. in the early 1900s, married and raised seven sons and later returned to England with her husband and stayed through World War II. She was an outspoken feminist, highly critical of the Roman Catholic church, in favor of birth control, abortion and financial independence for women.

Culled from more than 40 volumes of journals and extensively annotated, Ruby Thompson's reflections are interesting history and touch on issues that still confront women: conflicts of career, marriage, children, sexuality and spirituality.

Gerry Boyle '78 Bloodline G.P. Putnam's Sons In Boyle's second novel featuring Jack McMorrow, a former New York Times reporter living in rural Maine, the stakes for him to identify the murderer become much higher. This time, McMorrow himself is a primary suspect after Missy, a teenage mother who has given her baby up for adoption, is murdered one day after McMorrow interviewed her as part of his research for a freelance article. As McMorrow begins his own investigation, his cabin windows are blown out by a shotgun and his car is destroyed by a bomb. He begins to piece together a motive and a possible solution related to the adoption of Missy's baby while encountering colorful Maine characters who are quickly becoming Boyle's trademark.

Ann B. Tracy '62 What Do Cowboys Like Permanent Press Tracy's second novel captures the angst of teenage love as seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Louisa "Fish" Fisher, who pines for a more exciting life away from her small Maine hometown. Set in the late 1950s, the novel follows Fish's dreamy teen-hood desire for adult experiences as she falls in love with a boy she has known for many years as a friend and begins a novel based on her "experiences." Eventually she confronts the raw reality of adulthood because of a tragedy and finds that the hyperbole of her writing mocks rather than reflects life. Tracy skillfully balances her main character's fanciful longings with the intrusions of the real world in a story that evokes both the pain and wistfulness of adolescence.